"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.

...One iguanaSnakes and other faunaGot no bearded lady but we're get'naWhen you duck outTake another buck outRun around the blockAnd see a new show start." Museum Song: Barnum

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Cabinet of Curiosities, the blog carnival the celebrates the stories behind the notable stuff that clutters up our lives and living spaces, and most especially those oddities of natural history, relics of bygone days, mementos, talismans, specimens and ephemera that you and I have kept for all these years. It's just an old jar of sand unless you know that it came from Utah Beach, so here is your opportunity to say why it matters - at the very least why it never made it into a dumpster long ago.

The name of this carnival comes from the Curiosity Cabinets of Renaissance Europe, back when there were many wonders unknown to science whose boundaries had yet to be defined. Aristocratic accumulations filled entire rooms with natural (and supernatural) history specimens and later formed the basis of many a prized museum collection. Some were actual pieces of furniture with many shelves and drawers containing items both fabulous and bizarre. These collections offered opportunities for comparative analysis across what we now would think of as many academic disciplines: ethnography, geology, natural history, archeology, botany, art history, and many others.

Of course, there is an element of P.T. Barnum here, along with serious inquiry into the nature of all things. Submissions to Cabinet of Curiosities are not limited to those wonders we have in our own collections but the fantastic and unusual we have encountered elsewhere and that are suitable for a virtual wunderkammer. P.T. Barnum's Museum functioned this way, as in latter years did Ripley's. My Aunt Peggy got inspired and sent me this:

"What comes first to my mind today is the gravestone riding around in the back of our handyman's pick-up. He did some work recently for a fellow moving on from his farmhouse to a long term care facility. The farmhouse is to be rented, and our friend John couldn't help but mention to his employer that every time they stepped off the front porch they landed on someone's headstone, being used as part of the front walk." Oh God yes," was the response." We can't rent the house with that thing there. Throw it in the woods." John decided instead to try to find out about it's rightful owner. He thinks it is a stone provided by the military. It reads as follows:

Clarence Thomas

Delaware

PVT 52 CO

152 Depot Brigade

World War 1

December 13 1890

March 14 1956

In John's opinion this was the stone of a black man, hence the Depot Brigade, as African Americans were not allowed into the regular army in the first world war. It is in good condition, and shows no sign of being hit by tractor or plow, as can happen around the Eastern Shore of Maryland. John's got a military buddy looking into the matter, and someone else who might look on the Net. Until he comes up with some more information, John will take care of it, keeping it near, in the back of his truck."

This is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind for this Carnival. There have been some grand submissions, some that appropriately enough defy easy categorization, so without further preamble let us draw back the curtains and see what wonders lie within!

Apple's Tree features a remarkable assemblage of chronometers as the proprietor asks; " "What time is it?" The point of Apple's post is that these are not timepieces in the usual sense but touchstones to other times and people and even though most of them don't work she can't bear to part with them. She writes; "I have actually worn both of the ladies pendant's. The older, smaller one belonged to my great-grandmother, Charlotte Hollington Berry Sanders. She was always called Lottie. This watch is very special to me because I was named for her." I had a Great Aunt Lottie myself, and know just how she feels about this sort of stuff.

Denise Olson at Moultrie Creek has a gem of a post which in true wunderkammer fashion manages tocombine elements of the fantastic and the mundane with this post about the alien signal receptor the blog administrator has constructed from a collection of antique glass; a bottle tree. "Glass insulators originated before the Civil War with the advent of the telegraph. Something was needed to keep the wire from grounding out against the wooden poles and glass was the answer. There were all kinds of insulators developed over the years. Although there is a large community of collectors, most varieties are a dime a dozen these days - including all of mine. I still love them - the shapes and colors add interest to a displayed collection of bottles and a touch of nostalgia." Nature and art combine to transform a "dime a dozen collection" into something marvelously strange!

National Geographic has been nothing but a cabinet of curiosities, and now that it is available on the web as well as in its signature yellow covered magazine we are treated to the sort of exotic specimens most of us do not have on our mantle pieces. Mark Silver's Mummy Hair Piece was nominated for this carnival, and the picture at left (credited to the Hierakonpolis Expedition) is a 5,000 year old hair weave. Mark writes; " The hair extensions were woven to the mummy’s real hair were … also her real hair. She must have grown it, cut it off, then had it woven back on for a little hairdo height. (Big hair was really popular in 3600 B.C.) The weave woman also dyed her hair with henna for color that really lasted – we’re talking millennia!"

Hill Country of Monroe County, Mississippiis curiosity central, and Terry Thornton had many possibilities to blog about for this carnival, ultimately settling on Mola and Voodoo and my cat Hattie. The pillow is not what it appears to be. Says Terry; "My friend was told by members of his family that the image on the mola was no doubt voodoo --- that it honored black magic --- that it was probably devil worship! Their objections were so strong that my friend moved the mola from place to place and finally decided to be rid of the object causing his family so much concern --- so he brought the mola and presented it to my wife and me."

George Washington slept here, there and everywhere, and apparently there is hardly a spit of sand between New York and Maine where the Pirate Captain Kidd failed to turn a shovel. Janice of Cow Hampshire tells us a tale from 1823 of hokum and hooey that nonetheless got the good folks in Antrim New Hampshire digging for Kidd's buried treasure around the shores of a local pond. "This noted pirate was executed in London, May 24, 1701; and his plunder was seized, consisting of sixty-two pounds of gold, seventy-one pounds of silver; and various bags of diamonds and curiosities. But this was considered only a fraction of what he had, and he was said to have buried here and there immense treasures for future use...Some way the rumor got afloat that he had borne a part of the gold into New Hampshire, and buried it on the shores of Rye pond in Antrim! Somebody started this as a practical joke. But it was talked over, and taken up by fortune-tellers, till one and another went to hunt for the treasure." P.T. Barnum, indeed!

There is a reputed gateway to Hell in Stull Kansas, according to Blue Skelton Productions. Evidently not to be missed on your next cross country roadtrip. "These days, I would not recommend sneaking into the Stull cemetery. Without the Church, there really isn't anything that exciting to see. Plus the Sherrif will toss you in the clink if they catch you. They used to be pretty cool about the whole thing and would let you off with a fine and a couple days served but I'm not sure I'd risk it these days...the cemetery is located off the highway, you can't miss it."

My own contribution to this first edition of Cabinet of Curiosities is a post about this gavel, which was used by my Aunt Het the suffragist at a National Women Suffrage Day event in 1914. There are a few other items of Votes for Women memorabilia in my family archives, but this one really stands out. 87 years after the 19th Amendment became law in America, this gavel is a reminder of the effort it took to bring that about.

David Gregg at Rhode Island Natural History Survey had an epiphany when contemplating the fiendish form of the invasive water chestnut seed. He suddenly realized afunny thing about trapa natans: a seed pod had successfully invaded a museum collection he had once encountered wired into a display of native American arrowpoints. "Now you can just imagine the person, around 1920, probably some handyman on the Haffenreffer farm, who was charged with wiring up an appropriate museum display out of a shoebox full of arrowheads and other stuff. Using the idiom of the day he dutifully imposed the expected scientific orderliness on the points, scrapers, awls, and knives. But he was certainly stumped by the water chestnut seed he found among them. Like many, many archaeologists before and since, he punted and wired it up in the top middle of the board, where it is undoubtedly displayed as a “ritual object,” central to the otherwise comprehensible material world arrayed around it, but to outsiders fundamentally mysterious."

The Jungle Trader alerts us to the problem of counterfeit shrunken heads. "Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and nonhuman replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear." I shall certainly bear that in mind. It rather calls to mind a bit of doggerel by the late, lamented Flanders and Swann:

"We're frightfully House and Garden At Number Seven B, The walls are patterned with shrunken heads, Ever so very Contemporary!"

At any rate, these are the submissions I received before the carnival deadline and I am delighted by the response. The next Cabinet of Curiosities will be the 17th of December here at Walking the Berkshires and subsequent carnivals will appear on the third Monday of the month. Anyone with an interest in hosting a future edition is more than welcome to contact me. Now it's time to run around the block and see a new show start. This way for the Egress!

A great edition, Tim! About the stone your aunt inquired about: it is not that of a black soldier. The 152d Depot Brigade was stationed initially at Camp Upton, Long Island, New York, as part of the 77th Infantry Division. The brigade was largely made up of draftees from the East and Northeast. Like all Army units in WWI, it was segregated and there were no black soldiers in it. One interesting incident occurred while the unit was at Camp Upton: five soldiers of "Austrian" descent were arrested for allegedly stating sympathy for the enemy. Another tidbit: another soldier in the parent 77th Division was Pvt Irving Berlin, who wrote a camp musical. That musical later was the basis of the movie, "This is the Army." As for the stone itself, its style is that of stones provided by the Army or the VA. This is an interesting mystery.

Tim, CONGRATULATIONS for such a curious collection of curiosities! I look forward to reading about and seeing the items on display in your most interesting cabinet! Thanks for including my Hill Country article. Now I have to go check my shrunken heads for nasal hair! Thanks for such a fun read and for such a successful launch of Cabinet of Curiosities.
Terry Thornton
Fulton, Mississippi